Viability Study of Soft-Processor Usage for Electronic Collimation Control in Medical Applications

Compton cameras acting as electronic collimators, improve the characteristics of nuclear medicine imaging, with an additional computational cost for the readout circuitry and digital control system. This paper presents the use of reconfigurable logic based hardware-software co-design, to deal with such tasks as the ones related to the electronic collimation architecture used on gamma cameras. The readout circuitry has been implemented as dedicated logic and as an embedded system that contains it. Both are studied in terms of scalability in the number of channels and response time. This number of channels and the speed of acquisition of such channels define the overall performance achieved by the technique. A typical scenario of electronic collimation application, using a high purity pixelated CdZnTe crystal as the sensitive material with a pixellated anode design, is the base of this performance study. The results of this study are the exact design parameters of an FPGA based embedded system that performs all tasks associated with the control of an electronic collimator prototype.